permission from the Venusians to step upon Venus.

"Take it easy, Phil," the President said.

The Ambassador forced a smile. "Alec, when it's all over, I will."

"It can't fail. The very fact that after fifty years of trying they're finally willing to receive an Earthman and will consider trade—" The President made, a large, gathering gesture: Everything's in the force-field. "For fifty years," he said with the reassurance the Ambassador so greatly needed, "we've been dropping them capsules of Earth goods and the means to learn our language. Drop, drop, drop, and we've worn away the stone. Can't fail, Phil."

"I know," the Ambassador said. He thought: It isn't that. It was the triple-distilled inferiority complex which gripped him and shook him. The dread of the terrible brains below Venus' mist.

One by one around the table they gave him brief, friendly God-speed. The distinguished guests were properly more formal with, "The Assembled Physicists have asked me to convey to you all our best wishes, Ambassador," and more on that style. He thanked them gravely.

One guest, however, distinctly annoyed him. It was Rupert Hoag, the last of the pioneers, that walking fossil from the first days of space travel. "Wide-open, Ambassador," he creaked with an antiquarian reference to atom-jets and a wave of his one hand that was not formal at all. Otherwise crippled from long-ago radiations was Hoag, but at a hundred and forty his one eye was bright. Probably he had not been invited to the gathering but just had barged in, being one of the half-dozen holders of High Privilege, that peculiar, all-inclusive reward for distinguished service. The trouble with Hoag was that he never would confine himself, like a decent old-timer, to remarking on the progress his years had seen.

This official farewell had a purpose. The men on Earth, secure and sane, were trying to give one last tenuous thread of security to the very sane, very well-adjusted (on Earth) Ambassador who in space was ready for a mental crack-up. No psychiatry or long-distance hypnosis had yet prevailed against the rampant inferiority, the primitive and infantile desire to crawl and hide which came often to Earthmen in the presence of alien, superior races. A foreigner who came to Earth they could respect and that was all; a foreigner met after a trip through space they met with their every fear and complex laid naked perhaps by artificial gravity, by unknown rays—by something.

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